Ms. Dias says one of her first assignments as the
head of the Rio 2016 technology program office was
to travel to London, England and Sochi, Russia to
meet with her counterparts for those games. She
was able to review documents and project plans,
and even participated in some of the testing phases
for those games through IOC-backed knowledge
transfer programs.

“It was helpful to observe their program management practices and to share best practices,” Ms. Dias
says. She brought back many project management
tools, including a plan to centralize the PMO and
a strategy to bring stakeholders from interrelated
project teams together into working groups at the
outset of the project.

In turn, Ms. Dias hosted her counterparts from
future host cities in South Korea and Japan, offering signposts for balancing risk management and
innovation in project delivery. The Pyeongchang
Organizing Committee for the 2018 Olympic and
Paralympic Winter Games (POCOG) sent 167
people to Brazil to observe the operations and
activities of different functional areas during the

2016 games. A total of 600 representatives from
the Pyeongchang 2018, Tokyo 2020 and Beijing
2022 committees, as well as delegates from other
bid cities like Paris and Los Angeles, went to Rio
de Janeiro.

“The Rio games were an invaluable chance for
all of us to experience and learn,” says Jihye Lee,
head of international media relations, POCOG,
Pyeongchang, South Korea. (See “South Korea
Gears Up,” page 35, for how POCOG is approaching
the 2018 games.)

AFTER THE CLOSING CEREMONY

With many communities unsure of the long-term
value of hosting the Olympics, project teams must
carefully plan how venues will be used once the
games end, says Stefan Timmermans, who has
worked on several Olympics projects. He most
recently served as senior program manager for venue
technology for the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee.

“Decisions about the legacy use of venues must
be made at the beginning, when you are defining
your overall strategy for the project,” says Mr. Timmermans, Huijbergen, the Netherlands. (Partly to
reassure skeptical stakeholders, cities are making
the long-term role of Olympic facilities part of
the bidding process; see “California Dreaming,”
page 37.)

Many cities have made the expensive mistake
of building massive sports venues without crafting
a realistic long-term plan. To position Sochi as a
world-class winter sports destination, for example,
Russia built a US$300 million ski jump and a US$8.5
billion rail link connecting the town to the Black Sea
coast. These facilities now sit largely idle; Russia’s
national ski team uses the ski jump.

Other cities have seen long-term benefits from
hosting the games by repurposing facilities and
sparking urban redevelopment. London’s conversion of its 560-acre (227-hectare) Olympic Park
into a tourist attraction is part of a more than £500
million transformation program that includes add-